Posted on 04/01/2017 5:42:22 AM PDT by NYer
.- Raymond Arroyo has an impressive resume.
He’s a New York Times bestselling author several times over. He’s an award-winning journalist and producer. And his weekly EWTN show, The World Over Live, reaches more than 350 million global households and 500 U.S. radio affiliates.
So when Arroyo says his Will Wilder series of books for young readers just might be “the most important work I’ve ever done,” it’s quite a statement.
What makes these books so important, in his view? The lifelong impact that they can have on kids.
“When an adult reads your work, they hold it at an arm’s length, even if they may be moved by it,” Arroyo told CNA.
“But a child enters that world with abandon. There are no limitations. The journey they go on is more profound, and because of how impressionable they are in that age, this book is helping them make sense of the world, and it becomes the language they’ll use to interpret that world.”
Reaching these young readers at a critical age is Arroyo’s goal with the second installment in his best-selling series, Will Wilder: The Lost Staff of Wonders (Random House Crown), which arrived in bookstores earlier this month.
The importance of childhood literacy is what led Arroyo to found Storyented a few years ago. The initiative, a project of DP Studios, works to connect best-selling authors with their readers, discussing their canon of work, allowing kids to ask questions, and creating online videos that parents and teachers can use to help excite kids about reading.
Arroyo said he hoped to be a sort of “passport agency” to literacy. And his Will Wilder books are doing just that.
St. Stephen’s Catholic School in uptown New Orleans serves many at-risk students. According to the school’s principal, Rosie Kendrick, some of the students don’t even own books, and it has been an immense struggle to encourage them to read.
But that all changed a year ago, when Arroyo visited the school and gave copies of the first Will Wilder book to the students.
“All they wanted to do was talk about the book,” Kendrick said. There were some students whom she had never seen read a book, now reading in the hallways, unable to put it down. “Will Wilder changed their reading habits by making them want to read.”
Arroyo said he was astounded by the book’s impact. Asked why he thought it was so successful, he pointed to two pieces of positive feedback that he was repeatedly given.
The first was that readers loved the idea that Will made mistakes, and that those mistakes had consequences, but that there were ways for him to go back and repair the damage that he had caused.
“That gave them a sense of hope,” Arroyo commented. He added that readers – especially kids from at-risk backgrounds – were reading about the demons that Will battles in the book and projecting onto these demons the challenges and battles of their own lives.
“The real world impact of how they project themselves into the story has really amazed me,” he said, explaining that numerous readers had told him, “Will gave me hope that I could conquer my own demons, that I could overcome the things that I’m struggling with.”
With some 67 percent of fourth graders reading beneath proficiency at the national level – and studies showing a correlation between illiteracy and jail or welfare later in life – the ability to excite kids about reading is no small feat.
“Kids really want to go on a fun adventure,” Arroyo said. If a book is exciting and has a protagonist that kids can identify with, “they want to go on a journey and find out how it ends.”
In the second installment of his young reader series, 12-year-old Will Wilder must find the Staff of Moses, which has vanished from a local museum, before supernatural terrors are unleashed upon his town.
Arroyo said the idea for the story originated after he read a piece in the London Times claiming that the Staff of Moses was actually in a museum in Birmingham, England. While he did not find the argument convincing, it started him thinking: What would happen if the staff was in a museum, and it went missing?
The Will Wilder books have been hailed as containing the excitement of the Indiana Jones and Percy Jackson series. But Arroyo noted that there are a few components that set his series apart.
“All the antiquities and relics mentioned in these books can be found in libraries, museums or churches throughout the world. So that grounds it in a certain reality that other series don’t have.”
Catholic ping!
What powers does the “Bugger of Paul” provide?
That is, “Booger of Paul.”
This is great.
The flip-side, of course, is the recent children’s book in which the farmboy falls in love with the prince, and the two of them eventually live happily ever after.
The Left is way ahead of us on the influence that children’s books can have on the young.
In the second installment of his young reader series, 12-year-old Will Wilder must find the Staff of Moses, which has vanished from a local museum, before supernatural terrors are unleashed upon his town.
Hardy Boys circa 2017?
Here is a series of books that defined the youth for a generation and had their influence right up to WWII. A lot of the WWII generation grew up reading these books.
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Alger%2c%20Horatio%2c%201832%2d1899
With some 67 percent of fourth graders reading beneath proficiency at the national level – and studies showing a correlation between illiteracy and jail or welfare later in life
2) What book did children learn to read from before education got involved?
3) Children are learning to conquer their demons?
4) As I grow older, I grow more thankful that some of Gods Word was planted in me at an early age.
If that’s supposed to be funny, it’s failed miserably.
Interesting. How and who compiled it? Just searched for Taylor Caldwell and Nancy Keene but came up blank.
Well, boogers and booger stories may have some social redeeming value.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/eating-boogers-may-boost-immunity-scientist-suspects/
http://www.boogiewipes.com/funny-booger-jokes-for-kids/
What’s the difference between boogers and broccoli?
Kids don’t eat broccoli.
Why did the man catch his nose?
Because it was running
How do you make a tissue dance?
You put a boogie in it
What does a booger in love tell his girl friend?
I’m stuck on you.
Why did the booger cross the road?
Because he was being picked on.
Where does your nose go when it gets hungry?
Booger King!!!
If you were a booger…
I’d pick you first.
What do you call a skinny booger?
Slim pickins.
What’s another name for a snail?
A booger wearing a crash helmet.
Here is easier access to Horatio Alger books. Heavy emphasis on character development, not mystery or supernatural.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=horatio+alger
I would add these books were read after the Civil war, a time of great social change in society. Loss of fathers from the War (we have a different loss of fathers today). There is a lot of understanding of the times to be gained fromm these books.
I have read Horatio Alger's From Canal Boy to President: or The Boyhood and Manhood of James Garfield (New York: Anderson, 1881), a biography of President Garfield for young readers that kids of today would enjoy.
There is no fantasy and very little if any romance or intra-family conflicts in Meader's stories. Most of them have historical settings, but his subjects also include business, auto mechanics and railroading.
Meader might have written even more books, but come the late '60's, the times, they were a-changin', and he quit writing when his publisher demanded that he include sex, drugs, and gang violence in his stories.
Meader's books are available today from Southern Skies Press.
I'm sorry, primary-school kids do not speak this way. Definitely not "at-risk" children.
Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys are just fine.
I'm sorry, primary-school kids do not speak this way. Definitely not "at-risk" children.
Obviously, Arroyo ws paraphrasing a general response from kids. The kids must have the intellectual wherewithal to read and comprehend the books.
He’s great when he’s on radio with Laura Ingraham.
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